For those of you interested in seeing in progress AI updates I've been working on over the holiday you can try the latest build here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8051911/FE-119frog.zip
Just unzip the EXE into your FE directory.
The biggest changes should be on larger maps. However, be on the look out for longer turn times since I've had the AI do more analysis to try to make it smarter.
That is a neat idea, I never bother with scouts as they really aren't more efficient than ordinary spearmen with the Master Scout faction trait.
I for one try to play a fewer (or single) city turtle strategy until AI starts getting belligerent, then I just take their cities and don't waste my production on settler units. The pop growth is important to me for my fortresses as I like strike garrison troops.
I would completely agree with this. Pioneers / city building should definitely have a population cost. Gold is WAY too easy to come by: you can get a lot from battles, you can get a lot by selling loot, you can diplo-trade. I will actually separately complain that gold is so easy to come by in this game that very often you can turn your taxes to zero. That should not be possible or there should be severe consequences. So in summary:
1) Pioneers should cost a lot of gold AND they should have a population cost
2) Gold should be harder to get in general and running with zero taxes should be unfeasible for other than short periods
I would think you could go purely on stats here, as everything else (equipment, traits, etc) is basically just a stat modifier.
They probably have to look at equipment to tell the difference between a spear, a bow, and a staff for example, or the difference between a shield and an innate defense modifier. Each of those distinctions probably has some weight in what traits they will grab.
And don't forget the traits that work only for certain types of equipment. Bonus for cutting damage is not a very smart trait to take if you're equipped with a Thunder Hammer.
Totally agree with both sugesstions. But make sure the AI builds their pioneers at the right time. Otherwise it will be nerfed again and probably more than human players.
Even on harder difficulty settings it's still possible to run your empire with zero taxes when you use a "no" or "some unit strategy" with unbeatable hero stacks the AI can't handle in tactical combat (at least with the present build).
I will get trashed for it, but wealthy is still too powerfull. The comparison with long time boni as mentioned above (10 % research) forgets that it gives you an immense head start if properly used and you will get the 10% research bonus sooner through the additional cities (and production too). The first turns always decide the race.
Good points Sanati and Vallu.
Totally agree with this suggestion. I think that this would solve a lot of problems, and it would make me use outposts a lot more as I assume they wouldn't cost as much.
This is an extremely interesting discussion I wish to partake in. I've been playing FE for quite a bit and I LOVE these 4X games, so much so I was having fun playing Master of Magic on DOSBox last week lol.While I feel many of these ideas to tackle the city-spam issue are worthy fixes, they do not effectively solve the issue of city spamming as some have suggested, if the player or AI has the Wealthy trait. Trying to reduce gold revenue through taxes and battles reduction, to simply inflating the price of Pioneers strains the gameplay in general, when the faction that somehow gains a great amount of gold not due to the Wealthy trait, is punished still.
Fallen Enchantress should implement what Civ-4 had, which was "City Maintenance" that incrementally increased the upkeep cost of all your cities pertaining to how many total cities you had in general. Thus, having a world-spanning empire would be extremely difficult due to steep gildar costs, but if many of your cities were horrendously ineffective at creating revenue, you would hopelessly bankrupt yourself into oblivion. Perhaps this route would implemented primarily with changes to the cost of Pioneers and anything else would help smooth out the edginess of the whole matter.1. An approach to curving city-spam with a mixture of City Maintenance increasing by totality and distance of cities from your capitol.
2. Increasing the difficulty of maintaining your most distant cities via their proximity from the capitol, by increased Unrest, thus emphasizing the reality of your empire stretching its cultural and commercial limits to dominate over essentially further geography.
3. Introducing new effects and improvements within the current three tree's technologies to foster reductions in City Maintenance.
Some of my other ideas would be going the MOM classic route, and thus having it so when you establish a new "city", it starts out as an Outpost for ten seasons (turns), till it forms into a Village, forcing both player's and AI alike, to "turtle" and invest one resource most important of all being time itself, into nurturing an Outpost. With a complete disregard to the original Outpost mechanic as it currently stands...
Putting aside my MOM idea, I would go further and suggest that the technologies you research along the way in each of the three tree's distinctly push you into a unique direction of essentially maintaining an empire. Civilization technologies favor an "American Mandate", Military technologies favor a "Rome-First" path and Magic I honestly haven't come to thought yet in my imagination. An American Mandate approach would continuously allow 3-4 total-improvements that build "mini-capitols", or like Courthouses in Civ-4 that substantially reduce Unrest and City Maintenance in the Town-exclusive settlement and settlements adjacent to it, thus allowing the formation of Core or Semi-Periphery regions in your empire. Thus, if New York is your capitol, Chicago and Los Angelos exert themselves the partial dominion that your capitol would. I would mathematically incline this game feature in that, if you maximize your total four mini-capitols, they in return offer only 1/3rd of their effects, yet if you use only 2/4, you receive say 2.5/3rd of their potential to maintain your fledgling commercial, Pro-Town Empire. Magic technologies would favor a Conclave-exclusive route, and Military tech's would make your would-be capitol Material enriched and its City Maintenance of conquered cities drastically less. These would be provided in improvements, and the construction of one, denies the civilization the other two tech tree's unique Improvements to do these things.
Instead of making it solemnly harder to found cities in the first place, there is also the option of dimnishing gains from additional cities.
Right now, more is always better, giving large empires a growing edge over smaller ones. Every city you add, is just that, a new city that gives you more power, ressources, gildar, research.
It is basically exponential growth and by slwoing down the pioneer generation cycle, the curve will simply take longer to go into an uncontrollable state.
Ways to counter this, of course, include making pioneers more expensive. Besides that though, there is still the way of making big players more threatening to smaller ones, making those in turn unite and go after the biggest one.
The way of dimnishing returns didn't come up so far... at least I think so.
There is already the mechanic of slowed growth for additional cities.
Besides that there are other ways, including highter research costs, gildar upkeep for cities as well as lower morale for new troops (going the way of "why me" if there are so many others in the empire who could do the job of getting killed).
In conclusion:
The only way to control an exponential power gain curve, is at the very least a countereffect of linear growth. Even better though would be several effects including logistical growth, linear effects as well exponential countereffects.
Further thoughts:
Making the price of pioneers grow exponentially (or linear... just growing) with every city and outpost you own, would add to the unexplored wildland effect. Growth would start out fast and slow down over time, leaving more unexplored and dangerous land. In addition, not every city location would be a ripe fruit to be picked, as it would make more sense to move out and grab the best locations first and the worst maybe never, considered the price they may have in the end.
Research costs could go for a logistical curve, levelling after a while so that technological stagnation wouldn't come, but larger empires would still be at a disadvantage.
As for Gildar upkeep of cities.... not sure about that one. I don't come up with a final conclusion for myself what exactly that would do to the game, given the rather simple economic modle of the game. But I tend to say this one would rather hurt the game as a whole.
One pioneer at a time per faction. You can't build a second one until you plant or lose the first. That'll slow things down.
I think the current effort is simply in regards to making early city spam less "required." I'm not sure they are interested in reducing the number of cities players make in the long term, just making it so you don't feel like you are supposed to get all those cities in the first few dozen turns by making the upfront cost prohibitive.
The current winning strategy is to build lots of pioneers and settle as many cities as you can as quickly as you can. If however building many pioneers early on is made very expensive then you are instead forced to build them more strategically when you have the infrastructure to support it. Adding a gold cost sort of works, but I already end up rushing pioneers early on for 100+ gold because it's that important to get them out quick, so a +75 gold cost isn't going to change anything (especially for the AI who usually ignores gold costs apparently and spends most of the game negative several thousand). I like the population cost because it's both not something easy to acquire and it makes growth more important which further hampers rapid city placement (more cities reduces growth making building the next pioneer that much more difficult). It's just too bad that population in general isn't very meaningful so crippling your growth is sort of a non-issue.
I'd rather see bonuses for less, larger cities than penalties for more, smaller cities.
Penalties suck, bonuses are fun, either one serves to balance the strategic options.
I recommend splitting off the discussion about balancing cities into a diferent thread; and leaving this one to focus on the ai issues.
If you give people a bonus for doing one thing, then they feel like they are penalized when they do something else, the end result is the same.
It is basically exponential growth and by slowing down the pioneer generation cycle, the curve will simply take longer to go into an uncontrollable state.
You and I understand there is an issue with city spamming, the great gross of revenue that stems from simply having a larger empire, yet we both have different means of attacking it. I'm confused that you acknowledge that even if you increase the cost and time required to produce a Pioneer, the "uncontrollable state" of city-spamming will still permeate.
I do agree with the reality that player's and AI will majorly of the time, continue producing Pioneer's and establishing settlements till there is no land to expand upon, but I feel that is an integral aspect of Fallen Enchantress, as much as Civilization, and even off-point RTS's. The anti-city philosophy should be about realistically straining a faction's capacity to build new cities and than maintain them by subsequently ensuring they're profitable investments, not building-as-many-as-you-can's and that's that.
I don't have an issue with strongly boosting the cost of making Pioneer's more expensive, but if that's the only idea implemented to improve the problem at hand - more needs to be done then simple unit inflation.
The Faction Prestige is a great mechanic to induce more strategy into the building game, yet me personally I consider it both inadequate and falling short of forcing factions to fall back from expanding so much without due consequence. As far as I'm concerned, I never at all considered Faction Prestige to exist for no reason pertaining to reining in expansion, but as another valuable and rare resource like Influence in surging your empire's growth.
I disagree with higher research costs, doesn't make sense to me as a negative modifier for financially-strapped cities. I suggested implementing what Civ-4 did below, but you disagreed with me right here, whilst proposing it yourself o.0 , lol. I don't think either that new units should be abstractly downgraded due to bloated empires though.
Could you please further elaborate on this statement, because I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest or advertise.
I sound hypocritical now - but I would only WANT a decreasing pool of "Research Per Turn" done on the global level, as in your stagnating empire wanes in maintaining innovation and empirical research, not reduction of Research by per-city. If we introduce your good concept on the global level, it would both "allow" and "force" factions in an encouraging'y reasonable manner to stretch their resources empire-wide in building up their Research Per Turn to stay within the tech race game.
Thus, factions with globally-taxed Research will be free to either prioritize research Improvements across all their settlements, or focus on their Conclave's specialization in boosting Research capability to respond to their increasing negative upon Research Per Turn. If inflating Research costs were felt on a per-city basis, they'll be too many circumstances where your best, or would-be research centers unable to overcome overwhelming research costs and exist to primarily invest itself as your laboratories.
Like, what would happen if the negative research modifier for expanding empires consumed all the production of research in a particular city, and it reached 0. Would the negative modifier send into negative digits? Or simply leave from the poverty-stricken settlement to the next one nearby like the plague? Plus, Conclave's and their Improvements produce Research Per Turn points on the percentage formula and offer the most opportunities for such, they would be worthless no matter how lenient the degenerative modifier would be on a per-city basis.
I'm confused you're against Gildar upkeep when you've speculated upon it as a good idea earlier, but from all my memories of playing Civ-4 I've never found it's complexity to be overwhelming when they introduced City Maintenance. If anything, it was an incredible mechanic for that installment for incrementally regulating a civilizations natural expansion of territory. Hell, Galactic Civilizations II has maintenance as an upkeep variable for maintaining planets, starbases, and ships too. And GalCiv2's approach is a significant departure from Elemental overall because in that series you go "tall" I've heard for the first in my life used for expressing the emphasis of Population in blooming your economy and capacity to manufacture and expand (How GC2 works). EWON is purely a 4X series that increases your economy across-the-board therefore allowing an unchecked, growing potential for bettering your empire.
Like what Derek or Frogboy would just have to do is design a city modifier that's just like the Unrest modifier in-game, that charges rising Gildar per city of yours exponentially as you grow your empire in terms of total settlements, and tile-distance between the core/original city tile if the Capitol, and locations of non-capitol settlements in relevance to self-check it's algorithm. Think about it: what's bad about simply charging factions more for building Pioneer's and the establishing settlements ides suggested earlier in this thread, is that it does absolutely nothing for tackling the arguably controversial issue with city-spam except prolong the various phases of it from early to late game, and in my opinion unnecessarily burden the player far more than the AI when playing sandbox sessions on much much higher difficulties. Such as the early-game rush to churn out Pioneer's left en' right, to mid-game establishing cities still a bit but predominately seeding Outposts over valuable terrain and resources, and the late-game phase of any further expansion efforts involving squandered tiles, Wild Land take overs, and Outposts some more.
That's why I'm strongly for all my ideas and yours, implemented on a comprehensive manner to alter, change, and make FE superior and more meaningful. As of now, there's simply not enough substance or tweaks to current game mechanics required to incentively push for the brainstorming, the strategic depth-inducing apparent to "force" factions into risking en economic-teetering expansion on one end of the spectrum, to more or less a City State-like playstyle that encompasses say the deliberate devotion of several Villages (3-5) to becoming world-class potent cities in their future specialties, or risking an imperial stance of claiming as much good, bad, and resource-only beneficial Villages (6-15).
So to close this post up, I'll list what I suggested earlier, and as Vendetta187 contributed too.
1. City Maintenance: Introducing one of the most important features stated several times already, born from Civ-4 to drastically regulate city-spam. City Maintenance affects every faction in both how many cities you own, and how many tiles they're away from your Capitol or Improvements in non-capitol cities in several applicable circumstances.
For example: to possess from one Village, to three Villages has exponentially increased the Maintenance expenditure by 0.5 Gildar, till you possess 4 Villages, which increases the cost of maintaining all your four cities including the 5th one to 0.8 Gildar per turn. Now from the 6th, to 9th, your possession from 6-to-9 settlements requires 1.1 Gildar each, etc etc. Any settlements you own that are by default 8 tiles away, are subjected to no Distance penalties such as City Maintenance and Unrest (The 3rd suggestion below) till you settle on any tile 9 tiles away from your Capitol's. Every 3-5 tiles you exceed after the 8-block sphere yields an even higher Maintenance and Unrest negatives in meager portions till you hit a "Hardcap" such as 20-30 tiles and it increases incredibly, requiring the advancement of certain technologies in one of the tree's to both reduce Maintenance & Unrest factors empire-wide, and extending the 8-block sphere limit incrementally.
And one more detail, Outposts should NOT be exempt from City Maintenance, but are not subject to rising Maintenance costs no matter how many any faction controls. If Outposts were subject to incremental upkeep the more anyone possessed, it would limit the capability of an Empire-like and City State-like faction from being competitive with one another and thus making it an equal opportunity provider for both of those play styles encourages all participates to engage in the domination of foreign resources
2. Civilization/Military/Magic-oriented Improvements: Modify present game technologies that are simply expanded upon with new modifiers to factor into global resources and cities, and also new Improvements mostly universal between Fallen and Men that nullify other unique Improvements upon production completion in opposing tree's. These very Improvement's as I have detailed in my first post in this thread encourage different play styles, yet across the board would lessen the burdens of CM and DR (Distance-Unrest).
3. Unrest-By-Distance from faction Capitol: The further your cities are from your Capitol and certain Improvements, the more Unrest they're stricken with and has to be dealt with.
4. Global Research Per Turn devaluation: Research Per Turn on factions that are huge, and not advanced enough in their technologies will suffer an abstracted, global reduction in Research points.
5. Moderately increased Pioneer Production & Wages: From Vendetta187 and other sympathizers in this thread, their cost should be inflated a bit, but along with an analysis of whether they should continue being the unit that can only transform into Outposts. My personal opinion is that Pioneer's should still be the only one to both form Village's and Outposts, but
6. Non-Champions can reduce Unrest in general too: It's surprising that EWON has never included this simple and clean improvement when Civilization has had it forever. When we have all manners of troops garrisoned in any of our cities, troops should yield the same Unrest reduction capabilities, which coupled with an implemented Distance-Unrest modifier would amplify the need for defending and holding both enemy and empire settlements to ensure they do not become worthless in their Outputs, and do not rebel and become either neutral settlements or their former empires.
Maybe this does deserve another thread... figured it relevant with the Pioneer issue we're discussing here*
Wow, some long posts.
In general I agree that Civ 4 completely nailed the trade off between expansion and current power. Expanding has a short term cost as the cost of supporting the new city significantly outweighs the benefits gained from it (plus of course the time spent building the settler). This means less military, economic and research power in the short term. But if the player can manage to avoid being wiped out and can avoid completely nose-diving their economy in the long term the expansion will pay off as the output from the new city exceeds the costs of having it.
This is a standard strategy game trade off ("guns or butter") and is how it should be if you want the two extremes of empire building expansion and rush military style play to both be viable (of course some sort of a middle road is usually the best strategic option but the main point is that there are trade offs and benefits from going in either direction).
My idea would be complicated in execution but simple in concept: make higher level cities more valiable- to the point where 1 lvl 3 city is easily worth 3 lvl 1 cities. Maybe make some of the city buildings increase in power per level, have wonders require a lvl 3 city, and multiple wonders a lvl 4.
After playing some Civ V, I noticed that game made expansion a pretty annoying slog with unhappiness, so that concept might work here using different mechanics.
Isn't the most obvious solution already in the game as a concept? If I want my units to have more soldiers, I need to research certain techs. If I want my army stacks to contain more units, I need to research certain techs.
So, solution: allow all civilizations to start with a maximum of 3 cities, and add say 4 of 5 techs to the research trees to increase this number. Rationale behind it would be that it would take a more advanced civilization to efficiently manage a larger number of cities.
Optionally, you could allow the civilizations to exceed this number, but only at a hefty cost in unrest. So for every city exceeding the maximum allowed by research, unrest in all cities increases by say 10%.
Making governors all the more valuable to boot! Good idea!
I opened a seperate thread for this discussion. This one derailed pretty bad from its original intent.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/439133 <- here ya go
Another good idea!
Ahem... So, uh, Brad, how's the AI going? I was pleased to see a Death Demon leave his lair and turn AI Procipinee's Tenfell into Moria
An interesting idea to slow down the rapidity of expansion and whilst it incredibly motivates both player's and AI to just research, research, research, it would end up making Research traits, Research Improvements, and Conclave's overpowered.
Restricting cities how armies are restricted would prevent countless strategies players would want to pursue. I think the army system is worth keeping it, and the city-spam not being handled this route. The strategy game would become one-sided with Research as the #1 priority for just those specific techs.
---Stopping the city talk here now---... My apologies***
Come over to the other thread, dude
Well expect riots with 1.2 since the turn time is increased significantly on large maps because the AI is a lot smarter. That's the trade off.
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